James Jensen

• Latin Christendom has tended more and more to privilege belief, as against unthinking practice. And “secular” people have inherited this emphasis, and often propound an “ethics of belief,” where it can be seen as a sin against science or epistemic decency to believe in God.
• It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.
• As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression.
• This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.

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• Treating it as a neurological disorder, however, sets the New Atheists within a long tradition of critical misogyny.
• But, like noting that religions are inconsistent with their scriptures, or that money is made from a televangelist’s DVD, the debunker ends up coming off less knowing than megalomaniacal.

• I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.
• The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance.
• These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.
• all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason.
• they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason.
• That sort of gesture has to be understood in terms of an American society in which a relatively small coterie of self-consciously enlightened atheists or agnostics are indeed confronted with a massively ideologized religion, which in many respects is very ugly indeed. What I think is wrong, and what I think is rationalistic, is to cast the argument in terms of intelligence. It may be that a lot of people who believe that they’re going to be rapt up into heaven are fairly dim creatures. On the other hand, Europe is full of dim agnostics. It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid.
• The States is peculiar because it is, on the one hand, the most rampantly capitalist society in history and, on the other, deeply, deeply metaphysical. Really, those two things are inherently at odds. Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing, and secularizing. But to prop them up, to defend them, and to legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values. That may be why there are a lot of psycho-spiritual stockbrokers around.

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• human beings are themselves *examples* of strong AI.

• "the acquisition of knowledge is not based on a progression from the subjective to the objective; it emerges holistically and is interpersonal from the start"
• We should explain failure to agree about values "by appeal to the gap between apparent values and real values (just as we explain failure to agree on ordinary descriptive facts by appeal to the distinction between appearance and reality)"
• There is no step-by-step progression from sensing to thinking, because there is no step that takes us from non-norms to norms There may be a story about how norms become explicit (of the sort told by Brandom) but there is no empiricist-style story to be told about how thoughts arise from non-thoughts—no way to avoid thinking of rationality as sui generis.

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• "Can machines think?"  This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine"  and "think."
• If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are  to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to  escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question,  "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey  such as a Gallup poll.
• We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes  the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly  as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is  played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original,  "Can machines think?"
• The game may perhaps be criticised on the ground that the odds are weighted  too heavily against the machine. If the man were to try and pretend to  be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He would be given  away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic. May not machines  carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is  very different from what a man does? This objection is a very strong one,  but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed  to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this  objection.

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• “according to strong AI,” according to Searle, “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states”
• Searle also insists the systems reply would have the absurd consequence that “mind is everywhere.” For instance, “there is a level of description at which my stomach does information processing” there being “nothing to prevent [describers] from treating the input and output of my digestive organs as information if they so desire.”
• Searle also charges that the robot reply “tacitly concedes that cognition is not solely a matter of formal symbol manipulation” after all, as “strong AI” supposes, since it “adds a set of causal relation[s] to the outside world” (1980a, p. 420).
• it’s “not. . . how I know that other people have cognitive states, but rather what it is that I am attributing when I attribute cognitive states to them. The thrust of the argument is that it couldn’t be just computational processes and their output because the computational processes and their output can exist without the cognitive state”
• The Many Mansions Reply suggests that even if Searle is right in his suggestion that programming cannot suffice to cause computers to have intentionality and cognitive states, other means besides programming might be devised such that computers may be imbued with whatever does suffice for intentionality by these other means.
• This too, Searle says, misses the point: it “trivializes the project of Strong AI by redefining it as whatever artificially produces and explains cognition” abandoning “the original claim made on behalf of artificial intelligence” that “mental processes are computational processes over formally defined elements.” If AI is not identified with that “precise, well defined thesis,” Searle says, “my objections no longer apply because there is no longer a testable hypothesis for them to apply to”

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  (C3) Any artifact that produced mental phenomena, any artificial brain, would have to be able to duplicate the specific causal powers of brains, and it could not do that just by running a formal program.
   (C4) The way that human brains actually produce mental phenomena cannot be solely by virtue of running a computer program.
• One tack, taken by Daniel Dennett (1980), among others, decries the dualistic tendencies discernible, for instance, in Searle’s methodological maxim “always insist on the first-person point of view” (Searle 1980b, p. 451). Another tack notices that the symbols Searle-in-the-room processes are not meaningless ciphers, they’re Chinese inscriptions. So they are meaningful; and so is Searle’s processing of them in the room; whether he knows it or not.
• Though Searle unapologetically identifies intrinsic intentionality with conscious intentionality, still he resists Dennett’s and others’ imputations of dualism. Given that what it is we’re attributing in attributing mental states is conscious intentionality, Searle maintains, insistence on the “first-person point of view” is warranted; because “the ontology of the mind is a first-person ontology”: “the mind consists of qualia [subjective conscious experiences] . . . right down to the ground” (1992, p. 20)
• This commonsense identification of thought with consciousness, Searle maintains, is readily reconcilable with thoroughgoing physicalism when we conceive of consciousness as both caused by and realized in underlying brain processes. Identification of thought with consciousness along these lines, Searle insists, is not dualism; it might more aptly be styled monist interactionism (1980b, p. 455-456) or (as he now prefers) “biological naturalism” (1992, p. 1).
• Imagine, if you will, a Chinese gymnasium, with many monolingual English speakers working in parallel, producing output indistinguishable from that of native Chinese speakers: each follows their own (more limited) set of instructions in English. Still, Searle insists, obviously, none of these individuals understands; and neither does the whole company of them collectively. It’s intuitively utterly obvious, Searle maintains, that no one and nothing in the revised “Chinese gym” experiment understands a word of Chinese either individually or collectively. Both individually and collectively, nothing is being done in the Chinese gym except meaningless syntactic manipulations from which intentionality and consequently meaningful thought could not conceivably arise.
• Since “it is not conceivable,” Descartes says, that a machine “should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as even the dullest of men can do” (1637, Part V), whatever has such ability evidently thinks.
• Searle-in-the-room behaves as if he understands Chinese; yet doesn’t understand: so, contrary to Behaviorism, acting (as-if) intelligent does not suffice for being so; something else is required. But, contrary to Functionalism this something else is not – or at least, not just – a matter of by what underlying procedures (or programming) the intelligent-seeming behavior is brought about: Searle-in-the-room, according to the thought-experiment, may be implementing whatever program you please, yet still be lacking the mental state (e.g., understanding Chinese) that his behavior would seem to evidence.
• Debate over the Chinese room thought experiment – while generating considerable heat – has proven inconclusive. To the Chinese room’s champions – as to Searle himself – the experiment and allied argument have often seemed so obviously cogent and decisively victorious that doubts professed by naysayers have seemed discreditable and disingenuous attempts to salvage “strong AI” at all costs. To the argument’s detractors, on the other hand, the Chinese room has seemed more like “religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument” (Hofstadter 1980, p. 433) than a serious objection.
• If Searle’s positive views are basically dualistic – as many believe – then the usual objections to dualism apply, other-minds troubles among them; so, the “other-minds” reply can hardly be said to “miss the point”. Indeed, since the question of whether computers (can) think just is an other-minds question, if other minds questions “miss the point” it’s hard to see how the Chinese room speaks to the issue of whether computers really (can) think at all.
• To show that thought is not just computation (what the Chinese room — if it shows anything — shows) is not to show that computers’ intelligent seeming performances are not real thought (as the “strong” “weak” dichotomy suggests) .

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• I'm always surprised to find people who "doubt" strong AI.... [H]uman beings are themselves examples of strong AI. I find it amusing to hear people arguing that they cannot, in fact, exist...
• Of course, I think it will be much cheaper to make adult human-level AI entities via a twenty-year production process using unskilled labor--at least half of all possible two human teams can do so!--then employing skilled computer scientists. But what do I know?